A renowned national legal scholar and expert in the areas of real property, gender, and digital intellectual property law, will be in Hawai‘i next week for a free public lecture at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. The lecture will be held on Thursday, November 3 from 4:30-5:30 p.m. in the Moot Courtroom. A reception with light refreshments follows from 5:30 to 6 p.m., and the event is open to the public.

New York Law School Professor Richard H. Chused will offer insights on how basic concepts of ancient Jewish real property law can be brought to bear to solve contemporary problems in the world of digital intellectual property.

Chused’s work has broken new ground in areas of property and gender law. He authored a property law textbook used widely in law schools across the nation, and has contributed chapters to numerous scholarly texts. His research includes in-depth looks at the temperance movement in the 1870's and how the women who led it were treated in the Ohio courts, as well as the impact of 20th-century landlord-tenant law on impoverished tenants.

His featured lecture – the 2011 Distinguished Gifford Lectureship in Real Property – is presented by the Hawai‘i law firm of Starn O’Toole Marcus & Fisher. The lectureship was established nine years ago by the Gifford Foundation to honor David L. Callies, the Benjamin A. Kudo Professor of Law, and prominent Big Island attorney Jerry M. Hiatt for their outstanding work in the field of property law. Each year the lectureship brings a prominent speaker in the forefront of property law to Hawaiʻi to share insights and innovative scholarship.

Chused spent 35 years at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. before joining New York Law School in 2008. In 2004-5, he spent a year teaching at the Law Faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on a Senior Scholar Fulbright Grant. Currently he is also serving on a Peer Review Committee that makes recommendations on grant applications for the Fulbright Program in the Middle East.